Something terrible happened the other night. I’ve been too devastated to speak of it until now. 

Not really. I’ve just been really busy and had to squeeze in the time to blog about it.

So. Here’s what happened:

For ten terrible minutes, I lost my life’s work. Every word I have written for the past eight years.

For 6,000 terror-ridden seconds my kids’ music that they’ve spent the past year and a half recording, all the videos of their performances, and all the family photos disappeared into the void when my computers external hard drive took a dump.

It was terrifying.

It seemed all too clear when one of my kids asked, “What’s wrong, Dad?” as they watched his fingers fly over the keyboard and heard his frustrated growls about out-dated technology.

My husband began his explanation, which my shock keeps me from remembering, but I do recall him using the words, “Your mom just lost her life’s work.”

In the short amount of time that I thought everything was gone, I realized how very much I rely on my computer and how much work I have put into my writing over the last few years. How very easy it is to lose something so important.

As I mentioned, all the files were recovered in the end because my husband is a freaking computer genius and found the quirk or whatever it was that made it seem like the hard drive was empty when it really wasn’t. But I was still shaken up.

I was mentally going over all of the things that could not be replaced and mourned.

Then I thought of the books I was working on and made notes of the ideas I had stored away to begin working on when I finsihed with my current manuscripts when my husband hollered,

“I got it! It’s all here . . .” 

So from now on I’ll be writing everything in my notebooks first, then put it into the computer. And I will continue to work off of the external hard drive and back up everything onto a flash drive as well! (Just to be extra safe and to keep from torturing myself with the possibility of starting over.)

I would have have started over, though. If everything was lost. Because writing is something that I have to do if I want to thrive. And I will keep doing it no matter what.